by Ira Robinson
How was Biel doing this? How had this seemingly normal, if strange, man created all of this?
Biel's hand twisted around until the flat of it was to the side, holding out the blue glow. The vision of Lisa evaporated, and he reached out instinctively, trying to grasp her. After-images of her on the bed sparked as the azure and red aura lowered, coalescing into the outstretched palm, and Carver gasped, wishing he could be away from all of this but too caught up in the fascination of it all to move.
The nimbus between the fingers and palm faded more as the bulb from above began to once again take control of the room. A golden glimmer, sparks of the light, reflected off of what was now a large coin resting on the dark skin of the man in front of him. His eyes traced the outline of the coin. How had it come to be? What the hell was this, really?
He glanced up to Biel's face, which was still smiling, his mouth agape at the immensity of what was happening, unable to comprehend it all. So much in such a small space of time, and he could not fathom how the stranger was able to do it all.
His voice broke through, finally shattering the silence that had overtaken the room, the shadows playing slowly around them as the remnants of the glow within Biel's hand continued to fade away.
"Are you human?"
"Does it matter?" was the reply. The grin widened, and Carver could not help but notice how sharp the teeth in that gaunt face looked. "Do you accept my offer? Will you become the Hallow?"
He adjusted his hand, motioning it toward Carver's chest.
Carver's eyes fell on the coin again, the symbol that had been shown to him now emblazoned as a pattern in the center of the metal. He could still not recognize what it might mean nor what the material of the coin was, but it was thick and, despite its reflectivity in the bare light and the slight aura around it, it looked ancient, something, perhaps, older than any civilization he knew.
A part of him screamed that he needed to run, to bolt away from this tall figure and up the stairs, to vanish into the night without any trace left behind. There was something incredibly wrong with all of this. Men don't just make things appear out of nowhere, or draw out the heroin from a body with as little effort as it might take to piss. Magic couldn't be real, and yet this whole experience was nothing but one magical sign after another, all at the control and behest of something that could not be human.
No, this was all wrong. Go. Flee!
But his feet did not move. They remained motionless while he stared into the symbol embedded into the coin, the swirl and bends of it looking somewhat like a stylized dragon or even fire made into a form. Black and red, gold and blue, all mixed and warped around each other before him and he could not tear his eyes away.
"What would it mean?" The word Hallow was strange to him, but sounded something like one would hear in a church or a mass.
"It would mean saving the world, Carver." he managed to eke a glance toward Biel's face at the words before the near-hypnotic nature of the coin in his hand drew him again. "You would save them all, and I will save your daughter."
Did he have a choice? Really? Lisa was dying inch by inch in the hospital miles away, and there was nothing anyone could do to bring her from the brink. Could he deny her the chance at a real life, even if it meant he had to do something crazy?
He had done nothing for her. He had been as much of a failure to her as a father and a protector as could be, and if, in this moment in time, he had the chance to redeem that, only a little, and give her the ability to live, how could he not do it?
As he reached his hand for the coin, he whispered, "For Lisa."
It took only a single finger touching the coin before a white-hot blaze of searing energy burst forth from it into the palm of his own hand. It liquefied into a strange golden and silver metal which slithered up his finger and into the rest of his hand, suffusing into the skin.
He screamed as Biel took a step away, and grabbed his wrist with his other hand, gripping it tight while the cries of anguish burst out of him. The sensations earlier had nothing on this, the pain of it digging through his flesh to the bones beneath and it spread quickly through him, unstopped by the screams inside of himself to make it end.
He hit the floor, his body writhing in misery and his mind tried to cut itself off, to pass out, but that blessing was not going to happen. His vision merely tunneled into a spot on the cement floor while his skin boiled and his bones turned to hot lava within.
A reddish glow began to emit from him, but it lasted only a few seconds before it changed into the same blue he had seen sparkling from Biel's hand. That, too, morphed as it became white and the cries pouring from his mouth grew louder.
For a time, his existence was nothing more than agony, uncontrolled and unstoppable.
When it did finally begin to ebb, his mind grabbed it with ardor, clinging to it, though the rest of him still wrenched and warped.
Stop. Please, God, make it stop.
The floor below him spread out, the vision no longer tunneling ahead of him as his awareness once again came to the fore. He tried to breathe but it was difficult, held for a while with each ragged gasp baring his teeth as he gritted them hard kill the pain.
Lack of oxygen, perhaps, or something more, deeper, connected to what was happening to him, frayed the edges of his vision once more as his world darkened.
Within those dark edges, he saw things moving, only on the outskirts of his awareness, though. Small, like worms or maggots clinging to rotted flesh, and the scent of something dirty, sulfurous, tainted each breath he took.
Then the darkness became everything, and the pain faded more as his body jerked on the floor, the wet smacking sounds of his skin pounding against the cement loud in his ears.
"You'll get your first mission soon, Hallow." The voice of Biel cut through the black, pulsing into what remained of his consciousness. "Be ready."
Footfalls scraping against the hard floor as something monstrous moved away from him were the last things he heard as the final vestiges of awareness fled.
Chapter 3
Although his body remained locked, wracked in pain, his head was clear, perhaps more so than it had been for years.
What had he done?
His awareness of everything around him was hyped, amped beyond anything he'd experienced in his deepest trips. Slow drips, mere trickles, of water slid down the cement wall across the room from him, but he could hear it as plainly as the breathing laboring from his lungs as the torturous, agonizing ache sparked in the atoms that made up his being.
Piss and old feces laying somewhere within the chamber, as well, suffused him, the sex and sweat from the rooms above drifting down to meet his body covered him and, if the agony hadn't been making him weep, he would have caught more of it. As it was, his nose was filled with water as it channeled from him, egged on by the tears in his eyes.
He was changing, he could feel it, every part of him not untouched by whatever Biel did to him in that singular moment of agreeing between them.
The intensity was damning, the sheer depth of it beyond anything he'd experienced and he had no way of stopping it.
Then the visions began anew.
At first they were only slight afterimages, barely discernible from the surrounding room, but as the minutes passed and he writhed further, they increased, but he was not seeing them with his eyes.
They seemed to be imprinted into his brain directly, spurred on, perhaps, by the agony, as a means for his mind to shut itself away from the incredible changes taking place, something random for him to latch onto for the sake of sanity.
But, after the first few moments, he realized they were not random at all, but were like a story, at first only a few things happening, then thousands as information was downloaded into his mind, and he imagined it was like he was connected to some great computer and he was merely a hard drive within it.
He saw horrible things, things his worst nightmare could never have dredged up, pictures of figures that were warpe
d and terrifying, each with a sense of evil and foreboding to them. Scraps of names, pieces of data, aligning themselves within his brain with a fury.
With those, too, came movements, videos of sorts. Here was a moving picture show of a great battle, with winged figures both dark and light vying for control of a plot of land he could not recognize but seemed tinged with a beauty that, if he could concentrate on it for more than that fleeting second, could have left him in tears. This flowed into another, showing him a place of darkness so deep and vast as to be almost unfathomable, with screaming hordes of creatures that wanted nothing more than the blood of their next victims to quench the unshakable thirst on their tongues, the heat so intense it could melt the hardest steel like butter.
More came, too, each piling on to him in a tableau he wished to close his mind to, but could not. His body remained locked on the cold cement floor, his clothes disheveled and dirty from the sweat and mud on the ground as his skin burned and cracked.
For all the information that poured into him as if he were an empty vessel taking water, he could hold on to none of it. As soon as he saw an image, reaching for it to grasp its meaning, he lost it, fading into the next as the images and motion were captured and filed away, perhaps, somewhere within him he could not get to. The war in the heavens, the vying for hell, all played out on the screen in his mind and was gone, ripped away as the next came along.
Even as they slowed, he could not hang on, and so it went until whatever was dumping everything into him was slaked, leaving him to try to capture the breath that did its best to flee from his body and he could do nothing more than weep.
The pain finally subsided, as well, and, when he opened his eyes again, the intensity of colors and light around him eased, returning to a sense of normalcy, but he somehow understood that if he concentrated, he could bring it back.
Was that a remnant of what had been left behind inside of him?
He looked down at himself, the shabby tee-shirt he had on under the loose jacket torn in spots it had not been before, perhaps by his struggles against the floor. The jacket, too, was in bad shape, ripped in a couple of places and dirtier than it had ever been.
Carver sat up, his head and body still trembling as the after-effects of the intense agony that wracked him kept his nerves on edge, and took a few deep breaths to try to calm himself. The harshness of the smells around him was there, undiminished as the intensity of the lights had been.
His body moved in ways that seemed strange, but he was not sure if that was a result, too, of what he had been through. When he lifted his fists before his face to see, though, he began to understand how bad things were.
The rear of both of his hands bore scars they had not before. The paleness of his skin, too, was different, setting a contrast to the new scarring that he gaped at.
The lines disappeared into the sleeve of his jacket. Straight and circles, multiple tracings of something that happened to him traveled up his arms. He pulled the sleeve and saw they went as far up as he could get the fabric to go.
On his right palm, where the coin had touched him, was another scar entirely, this one matching the memory of the symbol that had been on Biel's own. The light in the room was not great, but it again gave him the distinct impression of a stylized dragon or some other creature akin to it.
The fingers of his other hand traced the outline of the embossed etching embedded in his skin, slight juts of flesh extending outward, like softened bones boiled in water for hours. As he fingered it, a sensation of electricity, subtle power within the circle, scintillated against his skin and, a few seconds after he started, a piece of vision came into his mind.
He turned his palm again, holding it upright like he was telling someone to stop, and concentrated on the spot on his hand. A second later a burst of white light shot out, illuminating the room in a brilliance he had to squint from. It lasted only a second before it sputtered away and a weird thrill ran through his heart as he brought his hand back to his chest and cupped it.
His hand felt warm; not uncomfortable, but the fact it happened caused him to hold his mouth open in shock.
He rubbed the scars on his palm with his thumb as he shook his head. What the hell? What had he agreed to?
He tried to remember other things he had seen in the fleeting glimpses of visions but it all had, perhaps, happened too quickly or the quaking fright at what was happening to him blocked it out.
He let his hands drop again and looked over the rest of himself in the dim light of the bulb, so small compared to what had come from his hand only moments before.
The scars on his arms were not alone; there were more on his chest and belly, and, as he ran his fingers over places he could not see with his eyes, the similar raised puckers were there, as well, along his neck and his back.
They were patterns, but of what he could not discern.
He swallowed hard, and ran his hand through his close-cropped hair, the sweat pouring from him as the intensity of fear and dread raced through him, edging upward with every passing moment.
What had he done? What had he agreed to become? Where the hell was Biel now that this was happening to him?
Carver finally picked himself up from the floor, rising to his feet with a series of twitches and creaking of his joints that echoed around the room. He gritted his teeth as spikes of pain bit into him, but it lasted only a second or two before fading away. He steadied himself on the wall but as the seconds passed, his body became more sure of itself again and he pushed off toward the set of rickety stairs nearby.
His soul was worn, flagging from the terrible torture he put it through, and his feet scraped across the floor, barely lifting from it. He made it, though, pulling himself on the first step with the railing and, as he climbed, the edge of exhaustion started to fade.
By the time he reached the top and opened the door to the filthy and darkened kitchen, he no longer had to hold on to anything to keep himself upright. Ugly, rotting odors entered his nose, remnants of what had once been a meal on the stove so old and so far gone a few maggots cavorted inside of it, and the decomposition of bodies lost within the mire of their own piss and vomit pervaded everything. It clung to the walls, wafting all around.
He retched a little as the first of it came to him, barely keeping command of the lurching in his stomach. It was horrible, and, as he stepped further into the house, he wondered if he, too, carried a scent much the same. After all, only hours before, he, as well, was set into the same decay.
He closed his eyes for a moment, swallowing hard to cut back the bile, but the grief over the choices he made did its best to take control.
No, he thought. No, things are not the same. Not anymore.
Whatever happened to him in the past, whatever his life had been before, he knew, somehow, it was no longer the same. The frame he now wore was strange, covered in scars from his head to his feet, warped by the power Biel had imbued into him.
Still, he had to see. He had to find out for himself how different he was. The man who walked into this house and injected himself with the heroin could not make brilliant light appear from his hand, after all, could he? No. So, too, other things inside of him had distorted. He might not understand it, but he could feel it. Even with the exhaustion of his body, he sensed an impetus within himself to be different.
The words of Biel came again, telling him he was already destined for Hell, but could get a better retirement plan. Could that be the pressure he felt? The knowledge that he was damned for what he had done to himself and his daughter pressuring him to change his life into something else?
Maybe. Or it could be he was going insane and was still on the floor in the basement tripping his brains out and never coming back from it.
There was the new information, though. Even now, as he made his way down the dank hallway toward what was left of the bathroom, he could picture it, the sensation of someone standing over him, connecting to him and pouring the message into his brain directly.
It was there, and though he might not be able to reach it, there was a storm building that he could not deny.
That was real. There was tangibility to it, and it was far from the results of some hallucinogenic effect of the heroin he used earlier. Never before had he experienced anything like he had been through the past few hours, not in the deepest recesses of his mind. No memory of such an occurrence existed and no one he knew of had ever gone through anything remotely like it, either. Unless the stuff was laced with an extraordinary chemical, what he shot up was as normal as it could get. His dealer, Scott, that little weasel of a man who hung out in the back alleys, would never be able to obtain that kind of thing.
